Sexism in the industry

[Someone Depressing]

I'm sick of hearing about it.

"Why the hell is she wearing a tube top?"
"Uh, he has his ass out - you don't insult the entire female fanbase?"

"That armor isn't fit for fighting in"

Shit like this. It's a fad, a hype. It means nothing. Just girl needs saving from boy. Or boy gets completely disregarded because of womens' rights they already have in places where people complain about them.

It's stupid, and nobody should care.

 

[JimB]

What are you arguing about it?

No offense intended, but I infer from your weird use of English that this is not your first language. I only bring that up because the question you just asked doesn't make any sense when read strictly, so I'm guessing your question is why am I arguing about it, but I may very well be wrong. If so, please let me know what your intent was, and I'll try again to satisfy your curiosity.

I brought that story up because Oban asked me if I question artistic decisions made by anyone other than Rockstar developers. I do, and that anecdote is why. Everything that occurs in an act of fiction is intentional, which means every artistic choice says something about the person who made that choice. I brought up the intent of the creators because I feel like his question was aimed in a "You don't ask why that flower is in that painting, so you must therefore admit that some things just [don't have causes/occur by accident/are not valid subjects for scrutiny]" direction, and I wanted to preempt that. If every part of a piece of fiction is a choice, then those choices have reasons behind them; and if someone makes a choice to include three men and zero women as playable characters, then I think such a choice is at least suspicious enough to merit a frank question or two about the motives of the people who made that choice.

 

[wulf3n]

we would get the entirety of homo sapiens working on a cure for AIDS.

Before you said the entirety of the USA not the entirety of homo sapiens. If you change the premise of course the conclusion is going to appear wrong.

The remaining 99%+ of the population would be telling each other about how they're going to tell each other about telling each other about telling each other about telling each other etc about the project and soliciting donations for people within the project.

So the USA is the entirety of the world now?

You're making a rather infantile mistake about how to deal with an issue;

The only mistakes I appear to be making are from the beliefs you assume I have.

Your proposed "system" advocates getting everyone to work on one problem at a time, ignoring other issues and letting them languish.

Please show me where I proposed said system.

tl;dr -- let people specialize and work on the issue where they have a specialty. This idea that we need to have everyone working on the bigger problems at the expense of smaller ones is asinine. How many people do you both think are on this planet?

You're missing the point. We're not talking about uprooting people from their current career to join Greenpeace we're talking about effective use of leisure time for those who are trying to convince themselves that they're tackling "issues" as opposed to arguing their privilege with other privileged people.

Public forums have numerous onlookers and lurkers who never take part in the conversation.
That alone is good for raising social awareness but those people often take what they hear and repeat it to others, word of mouth is the king of social awareness.

If they never take part in the conversation how do you know they are here? and how do you know those repeating said opinion to others aren't the same people that take part in the discussion?

 

[Jumplion]

Hey the whole industry is entertainment, so basically everything is a first world problem.

Heck all the problems you listed about every atari game had at least one of them lol.

But if you can't enjoy little big planet because it's sack boy instead of sack girl well then... You have an almost meaningless problem with your luxury item you don't have to purchase.

I'd say look up basic concepts of Critical Theory, and that's about all I'm willing to delve into this particular thread for now.

 

[Riotguards]

sure there's no doubt sexism in the gaming industry, the last of us had a very hard time getting a women to be on the cover and there's most likely a lot more instances of sexism

but i don't agree that having just a male protagonist is sexist, if it was because males were better then yes it would be sexist but most of the times its just an artistic design however female protagonist are much harder to appeal to the general audience as its harder to get past certain notions, hell tomb raider is a good display of a strong female protagonist done right, it simply wasn't the right genre to sell as well (even though a good few million is better than nothing)

in my personally preference i would rather choose a male character over female, it helps me to immerse into the world the game is trying to portray, perhaps if game developers choose a mass effect style story element (essentially never mentioning any gender identification) then perhaps we could appeal to both genders that seem to hate playing as the opposite sex

 

[JimB]

I?m sorry, but I just have to bring this up again, you are basically saying that every game that doesn?t have a female protagonist is sexist. I don?t know if you can even internalize how utterly ridiculous that is.

Depends on the motivations for doing so, as I explain later in a post that you actually do quote, which kind of makes me wonder why you're still on this.

As far as I know, one of the stories is about

I'd prefer not to argue about these things if you're not sure, so please forgive me for not addressing this part of your post further.

What purpose does this question have other than you trying to insinuate that the authors did something bad by daring to make a creative choice in regards to their characters that you seemingly don?t agree with?

It has the same purpose any question ought to have: to try to get someone who has the answer to provide the requested information.

I am not sure what the point of your little anecdote is supposed to be?

Keep reading the thread. You'll see where I explained that in explicit detail.

So you suddenly realize that directors have a purpose for the characters they employ and can?t suddenly exchange them with a black female transsexual dwarf at will to portray the same situation as before? You realize that it is stupid to ask and will only make the directors visibly annoyed at some random dude questioning why a basic premise of their plots or world are the way they are?

Please don't do that. Please don't couch my statements as if they're your own and I secretly agree with you mocking my position (or more accurately, your misrepresentation of my position, but never mind). It's dishonest and annoying.

 

[wulf3n]

snip

I couldn't really be bothered going any further with this. I'm sure we both have better uses of our time than misrepresenting each others opinion, though there is one more thing I'd like to say.

If they never take part in the conversation how do you know they are here?

Spoiler

How reasonable the assumption is depends on how The Escapist monitors views for threads; does it count every view or simply every first view from a new IP? After exiting and entering the thread multiple times and the viewcount not so much as budging, I'm going to say the latter. This means there are roughly 27 times as many lurkers as participators in this thread.

I've observed the opposite with threads I've created. I'll often refresh the page to determine if there has been any new posting activity and seen the view count steadily increase in correlation with my refresh count.

I guess we'd need a mod to confirm the backend functionality.

 

[Fox12]

If video games are your passion, then by all means, pursue the sexism of not having a female protagonist in Grand Theft Auto V; I won't tell you what your priorities are required to be.

I think you better explain the logic behind how a video game not having a female protagonist is ?sexist?, is any game that doesn?t have black or Asian protagonists ?racist? or every game without gay or transsexual protagonists ?homophobic/transphobic? respectively?

A large problem in these discussions is often that people don?t even know what they are talking about.

Fanservice is sexist when a characters primary role or personality trait is to be sexually attractive, and her entire personality revolves around this one trait. If her only personality trait is that she's attractive then it devalues her as a human being, because it suggests that her only worth is her physical value to the male audience. Her value is tied directly to her attractiveness, and if the character lacks any personality than she is little more than an object to be ogled. When a persons value is tied to something this subjective it hurts the value of people as a whole. Unfortunately in some cases, though not all, the fanservice becomes borderline misogynistic or turns into objectification. A common trope in anime is a woman losing her clothing, or being caught naked, in which case she is embarrassed or enraged. This is often played for comedy. And yet there is something inherently sick in taking pleasure from the mortification and humiliation of another persons physical and psychological exposure. This is dehumanizing. At best fanservice is distracting, and at worst it is disturbing.

This is where your argument falls flat on its face, you talk about fictional video game characters as if they were living beings, you refer to them as ?human being? and ?person?. You refer to what is happening to them as ?objectification? and ?dehumanizing?.
None of this applies to fictional characters or movies with violence in them, horror movies and any kind of fiction where anything bad happens to any character would have been banned long ago.

At the same time I bet that you would be one of the first to jump at and applaud or defend ?fan service? as long as it was for women or the gay community.

This kind of double standard can often be observed within feminist communities, for instance slightly tasteless decorations involving female breasts are monstrous but severed male members for pleasuring oneself are the best thing ever:
http://jezebel.com/5976192/do-you-like-video-games-well-then-youll-love-masturbating-to-this-sexy-dismembered-lady-torso
http://jezebel.com/these-avengers-themed-vibrators-are-probably-the-best-m-1099156225
http://www.themarysue.com/dead-island-torso/
http://www.themarysue.com/superhero-package/

They also scream about "sexism" and go on tirades at the barest mention of breasts or in regards to a pose on a movie poster, but then in turn go gaga over something like "Magic Mike":
http://jezebel.com/5903473/heres-the-trailer-for-magic-mike-the-male-stripper-movie-based-on-channing-tatums-life
http://jezebel.com/5918520/finally-the-ass+tastic-magic-mike-gifs-you-were-waiting-for
http://jezebel.com/5921798/magic-mike-is-the-stripper-movie-that-will-bring-womankind-together

I'm not entirely sure where you drew this conclusion. Human beings use fictional stories to explore ideas and universal truths, so the belief that they don't have any impact on society, or that they don't shape our culture is a little strange. Yes, the characters in Uncle Toms Cabin were fictional, but the way the book portrayed its characters had a large impact on our society. The Jungle is not about real people, but it shaped our society, and even our government. A female character may be fictional, but she can still be objectified within her own fictional universe. The way we portray groups of people in our fictional stories matter. Would you argue that a KKK game where you murder African Americans isn't racist just because the characters are virtual? Fictional characters are representative of real people.

Isn't it easy to burn straw men? Incidentally, there exists no double standard in my mind. If it's sexist for men to do something, then it's sexist for women to do it, if not less frequent. I agree with you there. Sexist fanfiction is wrong regardless of who the audience is.

 

[Fox12]

Making a game for a target audience does not justify sexism. The developers have every right to make a sexist game, or a game that has fanservice, because of freedom of speech. However, that does not make it morally right, regardless of their motivation.

This is where people take the 'Games are art' bandwagon way to far. Sure creators have freedom to an extent, but to criticize a big title for pandering to its central audience is to ignore that means by which a major title gains its support, through investors (of whom are stakeholders in the project and will direct how it is made in an attempt to gain the greatest profit).

Also, applying your morality to pieces of fiction not particularly targeted toward you is not a valid criticism.

Fanservice is sexist when a characters primary role or personality trait is to be sexually attractive, and her entire personality revolves around this one trait. If her only personality trait is that she's attractive then it devalues her as a human being, because it suggests that her only worth is her physical value to the male audience.

There's a very defined line between what is fictional and what is reality, and if a writer/creator decides that their work would be better if a character was included to fulfill only one role I don't think they should be judged for creating a fantasy setting where this is possible. Remember that unless it says it was 'based on a true story' it means that this work deliberately deviates from reality in order to satiate the player/viewer with an experience in which they would enjoy. And in a capitalistic world if a developer thinks that their audience will appreciate fan service more then a coherent narrative, firstly it speaks volumes about the audience but secondly that's their decision and we all have the power to either accept or reject this concession.

To imply that a product is discriminatory towards a whole gender because it seeks to service the desires of another is (imo) a bit over-reaching. If a game isn't for you, it isn't for you, it doesn't mean that its sexist, it may just be trying to appeal to the fantasies of one particular demographic, especially when considering games (as well as anime) are deliberate hyperbole and deviations from reality (so the audience knows that what they are experiencing is indeed fiction).

As a consumer I have every right to criticize a game, just like other consumers have a right to praise it. As I said before, I would never seek to ban or censor a game. I may not like aspects of Dragons Crown, but I think the creator has the right to make a game like that if he wants, and I wouldn't take any steps to force it out of existence. I'll let the free market decide its fate. That said, I will criticize it if there is valid criticism. I consider sexism a valid criticism. I also consider a poor narrative a valid criticism, regardless of whether the creator was prioritizing the narrative or not. If a game is devaluing or objectifying a gender in order to appeal to an audience, then that doesn't stop it from being sexist. A creator can make a sexist game, and I can judge it.

Incidentally, a major distraction for me is when a fictional work actually attempts to represent itself as serious or realistic, but then forces in fanservice. This creates a tonal dissonance within the show that doesn't really work.